My name is Diana, but you can call me D if you care to (or just aren't a fast typist :-) ). I love the outdoors and preparing most of my family's food. Between my husband and I we love to ferment, dehydrate, smoke food, and we're always learning more ways to make delicious wholesome food.

My husband loves to make jerky and he's working on making sausages as well. I've been fermenting foods for a while now and have made red cabbage sauerkraut, dill pickles, fermented carrots with ginger, onions and my absolute favorite: fermented salsa.

I love the outdoors, but unfortunately, that is not my day-to-day lifestyle. I hope one day for my family and I to move to a more rural location so we can enjoy life the way we were meant to live it. Until then, we'll continue to explore it by producing our foods the way my great grandparents did.

Companies have taken over food production for the 2-3 current living generations. This is long enough for people to not only forget how foods were made, but actually to have lived never actually witnessing it. To some people walking this earth today, sauerkraut is a product that can only magically be produced by a company, and the only way for them to get it is in a can or plastic bag. That is completely false.

Continuing with my example, sauerkraut is one of the easiest things on this earth that you can make. My point: You can make your own food and free yourself from the dependence on large companies who don't care about me, you or your family. As an added bonus, food almost always tastes better when you've produced something that you thought was impossible. (especially fermented salsa!).

Welcome to the forum, D.! Glad you are working on providing your own food. I don't necessarily agree that sauerkraut is the easiest thing in the world to make, but if you find it easy, bless you. We have been making kraut for 30 years or more, and it is especially necessary up here in the "land of cabbage", but I wouldn't say it is the easiest. I have known too many people who have failed, and have even had a few failures myself.